Amazon Website goes Down, Costs Company Thousands of Dollars

Earlier this week, the Amazon website went down for just a few minutes. The exact amount of time that the website was down has yet to be determined. However, sources say that the site was down from anywhere between 15 minutes to an hour. Having a site down for just a few minutes does not seem like a big deal. However, in the small amount of time that Amazon was down, the website lost a ton of money.

So far, Amazon has not said exactly what caused its website to go down. Different sources have already tried to contact Amazon, but none have received an answer yet. This could mean two different things. It either means that Amazon does not know why its website crashed or it knows and is not telling consumers. If Amazon thinks that its site was brought down due to a hacking attempt, it would likely not want to tell anyone until it had all of the details worked out.

There was a very brief tweet made by Amazon on Twitter to CNBC. Apparently, the online retailer did say that its site was down for “improvements.” However, the retailer refused to explain further just what kind of improvements it was making to the site. On top of that, no one has noticed anything different about the Amazon site since it has been back online.

Alright, so Amazon went down for under an hour, and now it is back up. Not a big deal, right? Actually, Forbes is saying that Amazon might have lost a lot of money during this downtime. Apparently, the magazine says that Amazon makes just over $66,000 a minute on its website. So even if the site was down for just 15 minutes, which was the best possible outcome, then the company lost nearly $1 million in sales. If the site was down for an hour like what some websites reported, the company lost nearly $4 million in sales during that time.

Of course, it is not all doom and gloom for Amazon. Despite losing a huge amount of money, it can very easily survive this kind of loss. That is because, as of this week, Amazon had a market cap of just over $130 billion. Losing a few million will hardly even be noticed.

That being said, all of the companies that make their money by selling on Amazon experienced a loss in profits as well. It is harder for these companies to bounce back. This is because when people buy things online, they want to make a purchase now. Let’s say someone was going on Amazon to buy a video game, but the site was down. If you sell video games on Amazon, you might have just lost a sale because this person is a lot more likely to find another site that sells video games than to wait for Amazon to come back online.